tippingpoint

Ian comments on being accosted by a window washer in the CBD, and therefore forces my hand in commenting on this part of my current reading book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. In the section in cleaning up crime in New York during the early 1990's, I was interested to note that one of the big things they did to clean up crime in the city was have the police stop people from standing on street corners insisting on washing people's wind screens. This was basically part of the broken windows philosophy of crime control. People apparently behave in a different way on a dirty street with lots of broken windows than they do in a nicer part of town. So, how do you stop crime? Fix the broken windows. (Hey, it worked in New York.) Ian, worse than losing $2, you were the victim of the leading edge of a rising tidal wave of crime. Soon wild gangs will be roaming the streets. [tags: crime windscreen washer]

Page 21 of The Tipping Point mentions Gaetan Dugas, the so-called AIDS patient zero: "...the French-Canadian flight attendant, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners in North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York..." Assuming this time line of the AIDS epidemic is to be believed, I'm surprised that the transition from monkey to human happened in 1930 (ish). That's about four decades earlier than I had assumed. I might follow that thread a little more in a separate post. AIDS was a traumatic experience as a child growing up in the very late 1970s, and through out the 1980s. I definitely remember being a quite scared 10 year old when the grim reaper advert campaign came to air. It rather sounds to me like Gaetan has some fairly serious psychological problems. Now, I'm not judgemental of the fact that he liked to shag people, but surely there is a reasonable limit that should be imposed on the number of partners you should have at any one time, even without imposing my Christian perspective on it all. Perhaps I'm also tainted by having grown up in a…